


His Name is Home

by KalendraAshtar



Category: Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Angst, Coma AU, F/M, Ficlet, Modern AU, Oneshot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-02-13
Packaged: 2019-04-07 20:51:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14089410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KalendraAshtar/pseuds/KalendraAshtar
Summary: Ficlet inspired by the movie “If I Stay” and Claire’s illness during ABOSAA.





	His Name is Home

##  _**His Name is Home** _

_Is somebody there?_

_Can anybody hear me?_

_Ouch. Everything hurts. If only my every muscle had been this sore during anatomy classes, I’d probably have had an easier time memorizing them. I guess the staff is being miser with the pain drugs, withholding the good stuff for now. Bastards._

_If I could actually talk, I’d tell them that my pain is a good, strong, nagging, nine. A ten is not something you give away that easily, just because you’ve been projected over the windshield of your moving car – you save it until you’re sure, because once you’ve thrown it out there, you can’t just take it back. For people to believe your pain, you can’t oversell it – it has to be just right, so they know your ten means something of you is already too far gone._

_I feel people touching my face and hair, tender hands with concern on their fingertips. For a brief moment, I believe they are my mother’s. I always thought I knew what my parents must have felt during The Accident (capital letters, capital in my life), a bit like being inside a washing machine and then a quick succession of pain, regret and blackness. It’s not like that at all._

_Your body ceases to be your body. Well, you still feel it alright, every unbearable-goddam-it-ouch moment, but it’s already a foreign country of sorts, as your soul is already on the verge of detaching from it. Your whole life runs in a river in front of you and you dip your toes in it, playfully trying to assess the temperature of the years gone and then it hits you – everything you ever felt, all your life, all at once. The movie of your life plays as you spin towards what might just be the ending of it, and it’s not quite what you had in mind for yourself. It’s sudden, abrupt, sharp – the edge of the world for those ancient sailors, just when you thought you had that all-encompassing sea around you._

_At least my parents were together. I’m sure that’s the way they would have preferred it. There was sorrow in leaving me, but they were one heart – when one halted, the other had no other choice but to stop altogether. The beginning of my life is part of the story of how theirs ended – in mine ending, will something else begin too?_

_Here comes that nurse again, and I bet she is carrying a bloody needle. Yesterday, she stuck my arm four times in search of a vein to get blood for some tests – honestly, I have them the size of snakes, painted blue against my too-pale-skin, so managing to aim at one successfully doesn’t really earn you a spot on any board of honour. Her touch is nervous and fleeting, even a bit rough – I presume that caring for others doesn’t come naturally to her. I was always a natural healer, people said. Born into it, as the colour of my eyes or my inability to roll my tongue (an amusing party trick, but hardly a skill that would change your life anyway). But she is here, able to carry on, while I might never be able to listen to another heart that is not my own again._

_No, not that one on the curve of my arm. Ouch. Fuck, fuckity, fuuuuuuck. She’s lucky I can’t scream. If I bite the dust, I’ll definitely come back to haunt her._

_I don’t remember why I was driving so fast, since that is not in my nature at all. What I do remember is that pain had already started long before the crash. I couldn’t breathe then, and it had nothing to do with the pneumothorax I have now, or the tube inside my chest willing my lung to function properly._

“Sassenach.”  _Someone whispers against my ear and my heart races, in spite of not being the best for its own self-protection._  “I’m here”.

_He came, the man I love – I can’t quite remember his name, but that’s alright, because I still know him in a way that needs no name to be defined. For some reason, I wasn’t sure he would come._

“Ye look just as if ye were asleep.” _He brushes my temple and I crave the ability to move my head and meet his touch. But I’m the pilot of the vessel of my body no more - of the hundreds of touches shared, this is the one I won’t be able to reciprocate._ “So beautiful,  _mo nighean donn_.”

_Jamie. His name is Jamie. For the last ten years of my life that name has been my home. Jamie Jamie Jamie. It’s my favourite word, and there is a world inside it – every time I’ve said it, it has been slightly different, whether in happiness, sadness, anger, confusion, surprise, longing. Have you ever considered that no word is said, exactly the same, twice? That no person has only one true name to be given? I’m pleased that I was able to recall it, after all. It seemed important that I did._

“I’m so sorry, Claire.”  _His voice is broken, shattered into a million pieces like the windows of my car, and I’m cut deeply by each sharp edge_.  _He is already mourning me – how many people can say they had the chance to be present, in mind as well as in body, at their own wake?_  “I wish I hadn’t gone. I wish I could change everything.”

 _No._ _Oh, no. No no no no. Please, don’t. I don’t want to hear it._

“Ye were coming to meet me, weren’t ye? Because I was too damn proud to admit I was wrong in calling ye selfish.”  _His hand is scrapped. He has been hitting things in his despair. Who will look after it, when I’m gone?_ “I canna bear it – the thought that we parted without me sayin’  _“I love ye”_. And now ye may never hear it again.”

_I heard it. I already knew._

_I can remember almost all of it now. Our argument, the door banging when he left (was it my cue to leave the stage of life, take a bow and abandon the audience without a second act?). Only someone who loves like he does can hurt as badly as he has hurt me. That was the cause of the pain – he has wounded me, my Jamie (in this instance, his name is said with regret). I was already struggling to breathe to begin with._

“Claire.”

_I’m so tired. This body feels like a weight now, something too heavy to carry with me. My throat aches from the tube, I have an itch no one knows I need scratched, the drugs are giving me heartburn. My life is but a wrinkle in time and maybe if I let go I might see it all, make sense of everything, be happy in the simple knowing of what has been and what’s to come. I’ll always have his love with me and it will be a perfect love, a promised love, unruined, untainted, painless._

_"_ Please, stay with me. Stay.”  _He kisses my mouth and I want to yell how unfair it is, that he uses his powers to keep me here, in this ruined thing that I’ve become._

_I can let go. Will he let me go?_

“Sir, you need to step aside, now!”  _Someone bellows nearby, frantic steps everywhere._  “She is going into V-tach!”

_It’s not a tunnel with beaming light I see, nor darkness. I envision myself holding on to a rope’s end and on the other side there is – well, “not life”. If I don’t pull hard enough, I’ll lose the tug-of-war and will be propelled to the other side. It seems peaceful, tranquil. No pain, no hardship, no limits._

“Bone of my bone.” _He whispers again, close to me. I’m feeling my body less and less, caring less and less. This is his Hail Mary._ “Blood of my blood.”

_But Jamie isn’t on the other side. He’s only here. Maybe in the afterlife his lifetime would be just a short nap and we’d be reunited soon. But even that short amount of time seems impossible to bear – frightening, so terribly terrifying. The other side is a question mark, an interrogation for the hopeful, a full stop for those devoid of hope. What we have here, flawed as it might be, is very much real, very much guaranteed._

_Because in that staggering moment during the accident – when I felt my life, all of it, all at once – the predominant emotion was love. Not animosity, compassion, hope, fear, tiredness, shame, forgiveness – love. And I’ve come to realize that to love is to choose, again and again, on the perfect days but particularly on those less than perfect. To love is to say “I see you, what you are, and I choose again to entwine my life with yours”._

_And I love Jamie._

_So, I choose to wake up._


End file.
